RAID Problem -- Hard Drives Dead?

Hi all,

I'm very much a newbie, so I'd really appreciate any advice you folks can give me. I'm running my operating system (winxp) on a RAID 0 array (2x60 gb) using the Promise FastTrack RAID controller. Everything has run beautifully thus far, but yesterday morning I booted the computer and, after seeing the typical FastTrack message reporting that the RAID array was "Functional", I received this message: "Disk Read Error. Press Ctrl-Alt-Del to restart computer." My immediate thought was that one of my drives may have just crashed, but in an effort to salvage some information off of them, I booted the computer from an old 10gb hard drive that has windows 98 installed on it. I hope to run some diagnostic programs from this drive and see if there's any way to recover information. I've installed the raid drivers and the fasttrack monitoring utility, both of which show that the "device is working properly" and that the array is "functional." However, there is no drive icon listed under My Computer. I suppose it could be that it's too far gone to display, but I thought it would show the icon anyway and just give an error when I try to access it. Is there something else I need to do to get access the array? Anyone have any ideas?

Here's the rundown on my relevant(?) system components:
Intel 2.4ghz 533 mhz processor
512 mb RDRAM
Gigabyte 8IHXP motherboard w/ Promise RAID Controller
2 x 60 gb 7200 RPM Maxtor Drives
380W Antec TruePower power supply

One final point: in the past I've tried to run Maxtor's drivechecking program on these drives when attached to the standard IDE port, but it didn't work. Maxtor's tech support thinks my system is, for some reason, not compatible with this program. Otherwise I'd run that check immediately.

Thanks again for any help!
Justin

My guess is that the IDE cable was(is) having a bad connection. By reinstalling the 10GB disk the cables were moved somehow and the problem was over.
If your array was partitioned and formatted with NTFS you can't use them with win98, and you won't have a drive letter.